The Day of the Lord

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18

Matthew 25:14-30

The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez-Hobbs

I hope you didn’t come to church this morning expecting to hear a nice, comforting word from scripture.

We are at the tail end of the liturgical year—Advent is only two Sundays away—and the lectionary is turning our attentions to thoughts of the end, the Day of the Lord, when Christ shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. Now, I don’t usually think of the Day of the Lord the way the prophet Zephaniah does: That day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness…

I don’t know about you, but this was a hard reading for me to say “Thanks be to God” after I heard it. Zephaniah really lays it on thick, doesn’t he?

Zephaniah is known as a “minor prophet,” a designation that has to do with length. The “major prophets”—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—all wrote very long books. The minor prophets, on the other hand, all wrote short books, so short that all twelve on them could fit on a single scroll. In Zephaniah’s case, though, “minor prophet” is probably also accurate in terms of how much attention we pay to him. Let’s be honest: who among us has actually read Zephaniah? I’m not sure I had until this past week, when I realized I had to preach on this passage. I’m sure that I was supposed to read Zephaniah in seminary, but I don’t remember doing it, and I didn’t remember anything about this book of the Hebrew Bible.

So I brushed up on my history. If you remember back to Sunday School, after Solomon was king over Israel, the kingdom split into two countries: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Zephaniah prophesied in Judah in the seventh century BC, shortly after the Assyrian Empire had conquered the kingdom of Israel and led its people away as slaves. In Zephaniah’s day, the leaders of Judah were convinced that such a fate could never happen to him, because they were sure that God was remote and distant, and acted in history neither to bless nor to punish. In the face of this complacency, Zephaniah cries out, like a street preacher with a sandwich board sign that warns that the end is near. That’s the context for this disturbing reading we just heard.

It’s easy to understand how this reading from Zephaniah gets paired with our parable from Matthew’s Gospel, because they’re both about the Lord returning to judge. If Zephaniah is upset because the people of Judah are too complacent to do anything, then the Master in Jesus’ parable of the talents is upset because the third slave is too paralyzed by fear to do anything. The people of Judah didn’t take the end seriously enough, but this slave takes the end too seriously.

There’s a real temptation with this parable to make it about our “talents,” the individual gifts and skills that we all have. Since God has given us talents, this interpretation goes, we should use them to serve and glorify God. In other words, work hard, and everything will be okay. That’s not what this parable is about. It’s about money. The word “talent” here is confusing, because it means something different in English than it did when Matthew wrote his Gospel in Greek. The translators of our Bible have just transliterated this word, changing Greek letters into English ones. Talent here refers to an ancient Greek unit of measure, equal to one hundred and thirty pounds, that was used for precious metals. This parable is about gold, and lots of it. Today, a talent of gold is worth almost $2.5 million. That’s per talent.

You know what’s funny about this parable? Each slave gets what he expects. The first two slaves don’t seem afraid of their master. They take huge risks with the money he gives them, like hedge fund managers do. They double their investments while he’s away on vacation, something that you can’t do with a safe investment. They believe that their master is fundamentally generous. After all, he’s just given them millions of dollars with no strings attached.

It’s that third slave who is so convinced that he has a harsh master who won’t tolerate failure. That’s why he buries his gold. That, for the record, is what the Law of Moses says you should do with the pledge on a loan so that you won’t be held liable to repay it if it’s stolen. This third slave is working to absolve himself of any responsibility for his own actions. And yet, he still excepts to be condemned and punished, which is exactly what happens to him.

Taken together, these two readings tell us something about the Last Day. We shouldn’t be complacent about it, like the people of Judah in Zephaniah’s day. Christ will return to judge the nations, and we will be called to give an account of our lives on that day, so we should prepare to meet our Lord. At the same time, however, we should not be afraid of this judgment, because the fundamental message of scripture is that Christ is a merciful judge. As the author of 2 Peter tells us, God is merciful, not wanting any to perish, but for all to come to repentance.

Even in Zephaniah, the Day of the Lord isn’t all bad. We just heard the absolute worst possible section of that book. The very next verse, chapter two verse one, begins a promise that God will be merciful if the people of Judah will repent and return to him. The final passage of the book is a promise that God will come as fire, not to destroy, but to purify all the people of the earth, as gold is refined by fire, so that we may be pure and holy, able to stand before God. Even God’s judgment is ultimately for our blessing.

What we should take away this morning about the Last Day is what St. Paul tells the Thessalonians: “God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.”

Amen.